To truly thrive, piglets, grower/finishing pigs, gilts, sows, and boars must receive optimum trace mineral nutrition throughout their productive life stages. The role of trace minerals is becoming more important in today’s high-stress production environment. Nutritionists are realising that both level and source of trace minerals play an important part in diet formulation for optimising production.
It is important for producers to maximise reproductive potential during sow’s lifetime in order to decrease production cost and economic inefficiency in commercial breeding herds. Lifetime performance includes longevity, which is measured as the number of parity at culling or removal, and also lifetime pig born alive (PBA), lifetime number of pigs weaned and lifetime non-productive sow days.
Mashilo Phosa is the Swine team lead at Chemuniqué